Amid the world’s seemingly endless political turmoil, the recently chaotic situation in Seoul deserves special notice. As I witnessed first-hand in early January, there is much to celebrate in the brave citizens and parliamentarians who stridently refused – putting their own lives on the line – to turn the clock back in South Korean history and acquiesce in the face of South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s brazen announcement of martial law on December 3. Yoon is now behind bars, having been indicted on insurrection charges, while the Constitutional Court considers the impeachment motion against him.
Yoon had recklessly insisted martial law was necessary to stave off both internal and external threats to the country. Many of Washington’s Northeast Asia experts are now in a tizzy, since Yoon had emerged in recent years as the “poster boy” for the United States’ newly revitalized system of alliances around the world. As an analysis in the Washington Post put it, “Biden bet heavily on Yoon,” promoting the partnership in many ways – not least by having South Korea host a high profile third Summit for Democracy in March 2024, one of the previous administration’s signature diplomatic initiatives.
To put it mildly, Washington now has some significant egg on its face. As one Seoul political expert put it just before the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president: “We just really haven’t gotten much pushback from the Biden administration for the fact that the ally who they courted and who courted them has gone totally off the reservation.”
Yoon’s prominence in the West among the leaders of the “free world” emerged out of a set of particularly unique circumstances. It was not simply that the former prosecutor with little foreign policy experience could effectively croon “American Pie” before a swooning American audience. In March 2022, he was elected by a slim margin in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The South Korean population apparently felt more inclined to trust conservatives in this evidently more dangerous world, wherein the country seemed to be threatened now by not only North Korea, but also a rising China and a now a demonstratively aggressive Russia as well.
With the passing of “engagement,” the mood had darkened considerably in Seoul, mirroring a new, bellicose swagger evident around the world among the leading democracies. Confrontation with increasing arms races, demonstrations of strength, and allied summitry were the order of the day.
Yoon leaned into this new foreign policy environment. He used summit pageantry to try raise his stock at home. But joining the “new Cold War” meant more than just photo-ops with world leaders. Most dramatically, Yoon broke with all previous South Korean leaders by choosing to put historical bad feeling aside and to dramatically increase the salience of Seoul’s relations with Tokyo. For Washington strategists, these developments were a dream come true. The project of reconciling Japan and South Korea had long been a major U.S. goal with the hope of consolidating alliance efforts intended to counter China’s rise.
Just as dramatically, Yoon took up a role for South Korea in European security as well. For the first time, the South Korean president traveled across the world to attend the NATO summit in Spain in June 2022. Emphasizing Seoul’s new close relationship with the North Atlantic alliance, Yoon attended both subsequent NATO summits in 2023 and 2024, too. Again, for Washington, this seemed to mark a great achievement. Not only had NATO been expanded to include Finland and Sweden, but potent technological and military allies like South Korea and Japan were now affiliating closer and closer with what could increasingly be called a “global alliance.” Moreover, the newly dynamic alliance now increasingly took China as a leading concern, in parallel with the Russian threat.
South Korea’s emergent role in the Russia-Ukraine War went well beyond summitry and rhetoric, moreover. Seoul has become a major exporter of weapons to countries like Poland, allowing such countries, in turn, to deliver large quantities of their older stock of weaponry to Ukraine for use in the ongoing war. While most South Koreans evidently do not want their country to directly arm Ukraine, rumors had long circulated about such transfers, for example of crucial artillery munitions. Unquestionably, South Korea has made quite a financial windfall in exports from the tragic Russia-Ukraine War, but hopefully that conflict is nearing its long-awaited denouement.
Given what has transpired in the last year, however, it is reasonable to ask whether Yoon’s enthusiastic embrace of various Biden administration initiatives, such as the fulsome NATO embrace, were prudent and wise.
North Korea has been providing weapons in large quantities to Russia, possibly in exchange for sensitive technology related to satellites and missiles. In June, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Pyongyang, where the two countries inked a new mutual defense treaty. More recently, Pyongyang dispatched 11,000 “volunteers” to fight side by side with Russia in the Kursk area of the front. Previous governments in Seoul had built up pragmatic relations with the Kremlin. Such ties, which also had a robust economic component, had been successful in forestalling the North Korea-Russia relationship that is now in full bloom.
In addition, Yoon’s dramatic warming of security ties with Tokyo simultaneously alienated Beijing, with the predictable result of increasing tensions in Northeast Asia. No wonder China has not moved to veto the newly robust rapprochement between Russia and North Korea. Beijing has the necessary leverage, but has clearly decided to look the other way.
From my meetings in Seoul during early 2025, I gleaned that South Korean foreign policy leaders will be rethinking some of the Yoon administration’s excesses, returning to moderation and balance. There is, of course, significant concern that the new U.S. president will seek to break the South Korea-U.S. alliance, but such worries are largely overstated. In fact, more pragmatism and less ideology in both Seoul and Washington will benefit stability on the Korean Peninsula, lower regional tensions, and promote global security worldwide.